A KiwiGPT?

Working with systems providers could help to beat cost barriers as generative AI moves to the next level

- Peter Griffin

If, like millions of people around the world, you've been experimenting with the free ChatGPT service, you'll now have a handle on its strengths and weaknesses. After the novelty factor of asking it to write limericks and birthday speeches for you wears off, you'll typically find it becomes a very studious but not very intuitive assistant. It also makes a lot of factual errors as it is simply pulling information from the web.

But ChatGPT has a more intelligent sibling, ChatGPT Premium. As the name implies, you need to pay to use it, a fairly eye-watering $37 a month. I've been signed up for two months and although the bill shock will soon see me unsubscribe, I'll miss the more nuanced and coherent conversations I have with it.

That's down to the fact that ChatGPT Premium is "10 times more advanced" than the free version, according to its creator, OpenAI. Whereas ChatGPT uses 175 billion parameters, which are the weights and biases it applies to craft relevant responses to your text prompts, the premium version, based on GPT-4 (generative pre-trained transformer 4), is estimated to include trillions of parameters.